Hi, we (developers) have introduced Octopus Deploy at our place of work and love how easy deployments have become. We’re now looking to get infrastructure more involved, without their buy-in we’ll never fully realise the benefits Octopus offers.
Hopefully you can help with one of the issues\questions we have. Using dev terms, we’d like the ability to “branch” and later merge a project, for example:
Once a process and its variables are approved by the release manager it becomes locked and used for all deploys of the application. If V2 of that application requires a different deploy process we’d like to be able to work on the new process and variables without affecting the existing process (incase hotfixes to V1 need to be released using the approved process). Once the new process is working it would be verified and eventually promoted as the new approved release process for V2 of the application.
I’m aware that I can clone a project, and this covers most of the above requirements but I’ll no longer have a single list of releases for a project, there may be other downsides to this approach too.
Can you provide any guidance for the above scenario?
Thanks for reaching out. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but its not possible to merge projects like that in Octopus. You can submit this feature in Uservoice and if it gets enough love from the community, we’ll see what we can do about it on future releases. http://octopusdeploy.uservoice.com/
No problem, thanks for the reply Dalmiro. I’ll add it to user voice, I see some branching suggestions in there already; not exactly the same but related…
Hi Vanessa, I saw that RFC but it doesn’t really address the situation I’m describing. I’d like to be able to branch the Octopus project for the same reasons we branch code. This would give me the ability to deploy minor changes of V1 of our application (using the existing process\variables) while working on V2 of the application which may require different\new deployment steps.
I’ll create a User Voice item and try to describe this as best I can. I think my idea would work nicely with the RFC you mentioned.
Thanks
Thanks @Vanessa for jumping into the conversation! I was a bit hesitant if the branching feature was what Mark was looking for, but after giving it a thought I agree it is close enough.
Mark - Instead of creating a Uservoice ticket, please go ahead and add it as a comment on the link Vanessa provided. What you are looking for is quite similar to what we are discussing on that blog post, so i believe that is the best place for your input.